Old School Death Metal is the plat du jour at many an extremist fan’s table at the moment. It’s as if 1980’s Florida has descended on the world’s young in a flurry of hi-tops dragging a Swedish exchange student along for good measure.
American duo Acausal Intrusion (that name though…) look further North for their inspiration, Quebec’s own Gorguts and their dynamic and experimental brand of technical death metal.
Let’s start off with the production. It is pretty lo-fi for a technical band. The vocals and drums sound like they were recorded in the main room from SAW – you can almost hear the snare bouncing off the tiled walls and shit stains. It certainly gives the album an underground and punk/grind tone.
Nulitas opens up with a dark synth instrumental “Corpus” that gives off an early 2000’s found footage torture porn vibe before the Middle Eastern progginess of “Transcending the Veil” kicks things off properly. Deep dark growls and heavy dooooooomy riffs segue into discordant and jazzy bridges and frenetic drums which are interesting but a little “everything but the kitchen sink”.
“Nexious Shapehifters“ also has a lot going on. There are psychedelic elements alongside the technical guitar and bass parts with a flurry of scales firing off like fireworks in November. Amidst the mayhem the gruesome twosome lay down some cavernous atmosphere that brings to mind Nile and Origin. The spiky riff towards the end of the track has a good punky feel to it but I start to look upon this album as a jigsaw of sounds that don’t quite fit together in my head. “Qabbalistic Conjoining Existence” starts with a flurry of dissonance, that blasts out like D.E.P meets Weekend Nachos before dropping into a pretty gnarly doom riff. At nearly 9 minutes in length the styles and ideas chop and change stopping me ever really getting invested in any of them.
These two guys – Cave Ritual and Nythroth – know what they are doing and have the chops to do it. Is it fun to listen to? Does it have that ingredient that takes you away from the mundane and depressing everyday existence gifting the listener a cerebral holiday?
You know what, I am sure for some people it does. I am guessing those people will be mainly guitarists and 6 string bassists who like to hear multi levelled arpeggios played with brutalist war metal stylings. To me it sounds like a panic attack in a music warehouse.
A further spooky interlude “Animus” dissects the album before the maelstrom continues. It is at this point that I realise that I am the bloke with the wrong ticket. I have sat down in the wrong screen and I am wondering what the hell the film that is being flashed at me is all about. The freeform sounding brutalism continues and, whilst I can get on board with a lot of the parts of this chimaera I feel a little like one of the blind men groping at an elephant. My ears grope blindly and I find an old school riff that I can cling to in hope or a blast beat that fills me with excitement but things soon take a leftfield turn and I am lost down another dead end in this multi-faceted maze of metal.
The more I listen to this, the older I feel. I can hear my grandma stood outside my bedroom in the late 80’s as I blasted “Under the Sign of the Black Mark”. “What is that? It’s just noise.” and “Only Venom are TRVE Black Metal!” (OK maybe I made the last one up).
For these ears technicality and brutal music do not mix. It is like painting the Sistine chapel in blood and vomit using a mallet for a brush. The extremity is lost in the technicality and the intricacy is muted by the bluntness. It does absolutely nothing for me. Which is probably exactly what Acasual Intrusion want – this is not meant to be an album for an everyman/woman (insert gender) audience. This is for the people that love this stuff. And by fuck will they love it.
Me? I will never listen again and I reckon the creators will be just fine and dandy with that.
0/10 (only cos Into the Pandemonium got 0 in Metal Forces – of course this album is not worthless – it just ain’t for me ) Matt Mason
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